Reviewed by Scott Axelrod
One rainy night, not long ago, I decided to weather a trip to the former erotic epicenter of New York City—Times Square. Sad-looking and subdued by a police presence, the pimps and pickpockets have morphed into tourists lugging bags of cheap souvenirs and popping-off shots from disposable cameras, oblivious to the few blocks of neon-lit fuck-flick stores that remain. Sullen employees lazily lounge behind counters, rearrange outdated VHS bargain bins, and eyeball potential shoplifters, as thousands of DVDs are organized budget-consciously on ceiling-high racks, waiting to be wrapped snugly in ambiguous brown paper, and carried off to their new homes cradled in loving arms. As I stroll the linoleum-lined aisles, inhaling the heady aroma of aging cardboard, ammonia, and musky scrotum, and tiptoeing past over-occupied buddy booths whose blaring moans, overlap with wet smacks, I wonder if these boob and bush businessmen realize that websites like VideoBox.com, and the lush garden of similar sites sprouting up by the second, will eventually become the death knell of the peepshow porn shop as we know it.
VideoBox.com is unlike any pay-per-play sex site I’ve come across. With a mind-numbing collection of over 1,050 DVD titles updated daily, and a surprisingly cheap membership fee, it’s as if the most heavily stocked porn warehouse ever, has dropped on to your house, and that scratched-up, partially erased, unlabeled collection of third generation tapes you’ve been hiding behind those Disney film clamshell boxes, has curled up and died.
Overwhelming at first, but ultimately very easy to navigate, the site is an adult “Choose-Your-Own Adventure.” Fifteen hundred traditional genres are divided among 74 studios, 164 popular ongoing series, and almost every star you’ve ever spanked it to or wanted to spank it to. Each list is arranged alphabetically in scroll-down menus that also display the amount of DVDs/scenes that each genre/series/studio/girl is featured in. There is also a quick-reacting search engine that if you know exactly what it is that you’re looking for, provides instant gratification. I used it to find some of the ladies (like Kaitlyn Ashley), who were unfortunately left off the main list, but appear in cameo roles.
After finding a DVD that suits you, you have the options of downloading it, watching it stream in its entirety, or using the unique director-like feature that lets you seamlessly splice together a scene that begins and ends exactly where you want it to, by basically moving your mouse over a display of thumbnail-sized screencaps that you drag and drop into the film roll graphic at the top of the screen. The length of each DVD is clearly displayed, as is that of your newly created snippet. The Windows Media Player streams buffer very quickly and smoothly depending on the resolution you decide to view them in. For an extra five dollars, you can utilize the DVD resolution, which unless you’re a real stickler for perfect quality, only looks slightly clearer than the high resolution. The FAQ section mentions that all of the DVDs on the site can be saved and burned onto to your own discs.
For the average porn purchaser, there is nothing more disappointing than slipping in a DVD to find recycled scenes you’ve already scene, or the realization that the girl on the box who you bought the damn thing for, is suspiciously missing. VideoBox.com is a fully interactive site that allows you complete access to every part of every scene of every DVD in its massive throbbing collection, and provides a great opportunity to see many a star or genre that you’ve only read or heard about from your chums.
Porn vendors of the future may be forced to come to the realization that their establishments (many of which are now relegated to industrial neighborhoods and barren stretches of highway) might lose much of their already dwindling clientele, as more and more computer literate wankers, wank to the same product, for a fraction of the price, without having to obsess over and worry about whether that man mopping up jizz, is making at least minimum wage.
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